There are many who feel that the closed, proprietary applications loop a la Apple and its Apps Store is too constrictive, too “closed” to continue to be relevant, particularly in a post-Android world. Others make the valid argument that there are already too many in the marketplace and that a standard should emerge and claim dominance.<\/p>\n
I don’t think that these arguments hold much water, however, and feel that much like Linux itself, the open standards of the Android environment don’t actually move the game on in any way. In fact, if anything, they cause stagnation and stifle, not innovation, but consumer adoption. And that, after all, is what drives the bottom line, making profits for not only the device manufacturer but the developers themselves.<\/p>\n
The crux of it all comes down to one simple fact. When users are merely “messing about” with their powerful new devices and trying out every application available for it under the sun, they aren’t actually planning on buying many of these applications. While it’s great to have a lot of free applications available to play with, when you actually want to start using say your cellphone to extend your business productivity, as modern mobile devices are meant to deliver, you don’t want an entire plethora of apps each doing an element really well but not covering the full spectrum of your needs. What you then want, is as few apps as you can get away with delivering the tools you really need for productivity.<\/p>\n
And while in this situation you’re entirely prepared to dig into your wallet for that credit card and pay for the applications which allow you to work the way you want to work, what you aren’t prepared to put up with are problems. Bugs, glitches, unfinished elements, that sort of thing.<\/p>\n
You want an app that you know you can pay for, download, and it will work as it’s intended to. And not bog your mobile down when you just need to use it for its primary purpose, as a critical communications medium, or crash the OS randomly, or simply lose your all-important business data.<\/p>\n
With a closed application environment, you’re never going to experience these sorts of problems, as final sign-off for the application rests with the device manufacturer themselves. And they’re not going to give the go-ahead to a half-finished or sloppily-coded app, because if they do it casts their own product in a bad light. So they’ll ensure the app is properly tested with the device, that no functions will cause crashes or problems of any sort, and that the app actually does precisely what it advertises, no more and certainly no less.<\/p>\n
Because their giant multinational derrieres are on the line as much as if not more than the much smaller development teams.<\/p>\n
So while the explosion of Android developers might mean that you have access to hundreds of thousands of Android applications, the number of those that are actually flawlessly developed, and therefore actually useful to you as an end-user, are much smaller. Don’t get caught up in the sheer volume of applications available for the OS, rather look at how many people have actually downloaded and use those apps on a regular basis. Then you’ll find the proprietary architectures start making a whole lot more sense.<\/p>\n
Besides, if that proprietary OS is then extended across a wide range of consumer products from said manufacturer… well then the possibilities are all but endless. One company controlling the hardware, software, and applications is a model which works. A nameless, faceless sea of global developers causes the massive fragmentation we’re seeing Android descend into today. With six OS releases in the past 18 months, who’s to say the environment is ever going to be “production stable” as such?<\/p>\n
Certainly, bada is likely to have flaws at first. But just take a look at the App Store to see how smoothly things could work on it. Possibly even more smoothly than Apple has managed – only time will tell.<\/p>\n